


Fingers

by dashakay



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-26
Updated: 2009-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashakay/pseuds/dashakay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two hands and ten fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fingers

**Author's Note:**

> All thanks and praise to my beta readers: Alanna, Gwen, Plausible Deniability and Sharon.

This morning he wakes from a fitful night on the couch to hear a loud— 

No.

He can’t start there. 

* 

Scully's hands, smooth and white, small and strong like the rest of her. 

Scully's fingers, encased in latex and wielding a scalpel, making the Y incision with surety. Her lips turning down in a slight frown of concentration, she runs the blade down the stilled flesh of the body on the table. He turns his head away, envious of the bravery with which her fingers deftly touch the dead. With precision, with infinite respect. 

* 

She has very few vanities. Her hair hangs in a simple cap of auburn around her chin. Earrings are always tiny and understated and the only other jewelry she wears is the plain gold cross around her neck, resting in the hollow of her collarbone. Scully wears dark colors—grays, taupes, blacks, never wanting to stand out too much, simply desiring to meld into the crowd. But he knows a few of his partner's secrets and one is that she's vain about her fingernails. 

Her nails are a just a shade longer than medical best practice, the perfectly filed half-moons coated in clear polish and buffed to a high shine. 

A year or so ago, they were obliged to attend the retirement dinner for AD Barrett. At a round table in the ballroom of the Hilton he sat next to her, squirming in the confines of a rented tuxedo and bored senseless with the endless testimonial speeches to a man he barely knew. 

Clad in demure navy silk, Scully nudged him. "Can you pass the wine, Mulder?" she whispered in his ear over yet another droning speaker. 

"That bad, huh?" He smirked. 

When he handed her the bottle of Chardonnay, her slender fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle and he noticed she had polished her fingernails in a brilliant burgundy hue. Electricity coursed up his spine as he realized he was seeing her hands in an entirely new context. Scully's hands, not competent or caring, but glamorous, dark. Sexual. 

* 

In the morning, he hears a loud thump against the wood of his front door, too heavy to be a knock. Loud like someone has thrown something at it. Sitting up, he breaks into a cold sweat across his chest. 

* 

The sun blinded his eyes and he stumbled, his legs past the point of exhaustion, lactic acid burning the muscles of his calves. The wind whipped against his bare head and he realized he could no longer feel his ears. One more step, he told himself, one more step, you can do it, it's just ahead. 

He couldn't. 

His legs buckled under him and he collapsed to the snow beneath him. So soft, like a featherbed, ready to pull him under into sleep. He shut his eyes. 

"Mulder!" Her voice was hoarse but firm. "You have to get up." 

He couldn't. 

She beseeched, "Please, Mulder, the Sno-Cat is just ahead. We can make it, we can...we _can_..." 

Her hand reached out to him, her fingers frozen almost white, "Just take my hand." 

His hand found the fierce grip of her fingers and somehow she pulled him to his feet. Hand in frigid hand, they stumbled ahead. 

A few weeks later, they stood in the muggy heat of a Washington summer and she again took his hand in hers, her fingers warm and soft, but still burned by the cold. 

How many times, he wondered. How many times have I held this hand, felt these fingers wrapping around mine? 

* 

Her fingers are rarely idle. Scully doesn't fidget, but she's always doing something. On the road in yet another musty motel room, she sits at the splintering desk, her hands flying across the keyboard of her laptop. Hearing the connecting door squeak open, she turns around to smile at him, fingers still rapidly tapping away. 

* 

He jumps off the couch and flies to the door. His hands fumble with the locks and the chain. He opens the door to see a small bundle curled up on the floor. Tiny, so tiny, still wearing her white flannel pajamas. His mouth goes dry when he sees the blood. 

* 

The sound of the piano made him pause in the doorway. They were at the Hyatt in Detroit for a Bureau conference. After the closing banquet, he ran into a few guys he had known at the Academy and went off to have a drink with them. 

It was late and the hallway was deserted as he headed towards the elevator from the bar. He heard the sound of someone playing piano and poked his head into the Henry Ford Room. The room was dim, only lit by a few candles scattered around on the round tables, but he could see her. Scully, sitting at the piano. 

He never knew she could play. She fumbled her way through the Moonlight Sonata, but she could play. Edging his way into the room, he stood in a shadowy corner, afraid to breathe, afraid she’d discover him. 

Scully stopped playing and he saw her frown in profile, as if she were trying to remember the music from a long-ago piano lesson. She sighed and rubbed her temples with white fingers and then her face bloomed into a slow smile. Bending her head towards the ivory keys, once again her fingers moved and shaped the strains of Beethoven. In his dark corner, he tried to control his ragged breathing, watching and listening. 

* 

Outside the autopsy bay, she yawned and cracked her knuckles. Her eyes were heavily shadowed with the purple of fatigue. "How many more for today?" she asked. 

Mutilated mobsters, twelve of them. Scully was performing the autopsies. 

When it was all over, Scully's skilled fingers had found irrefutable proof that Sammy Barbera had been the razor man in the gangland war. He took her out for 2-for-1 tacos at El Sombrero and toasted her with a bottle of Bohemian. "To the pathologist with the magic hands," he said and they clinked bottles. 

* 

Sometimes he wakes from a dream in which those cool fingers of hers trail a lazy journey down his bare back. 

* 

He wonders, how many bedsides? How many times has he sat by her sleeping body in a hospital and held her limp hand? How many times has she done the same for him? 

* 

All he can see is the red blood running down her hands, past her wrists, staining the cuffs of her pajamas a deep maroon. He bends to her and lift one lifeless arm. Scully's eyes are clenched shut and the only sound she makes is a breathy keening through her nose. 

He lifts her arm and sees it. God, what they did to her. 

Her fingertips are gone. Gone, neatly severed below where the ovals of her fingernails once were. 

Just gone. 

* 

In yet another hospital bed Scully sleeps in a Demerol haze. Her hands are lying at her sides and he’s afraid to look, coward that he is. 

What more can be taken from this woman? Their various and sundry enemies keep taking and taking and taking from her. 

She'll never hold a scalpel like she once did. 

She'll never play piano or wear burgundy polish on her fingernails. 

She no longer has fingerprints. 

Burying his head in his hands, he allows the indulgence of guilt to wash over him. 

A groan from the bed makes him lift his head. Scully moves her head against the pillow and opens her eyes. 

"Hey there," he says. 

Slowly, she lifts her gauze-swaddled hands to her face and blinks. He holds his breath. 

"It's real," she whispers. 

He nods his head. He wants to ask her who did this to her, why was this done, but this isn't the time. Besides, he thinks he knows. It may not be their usual brand of enemies, but somewhere they’re drinking cognac and laughing, wondering why they didn't think of this particular brand of punishment themselves. 

Her hands rest on the blanket and she shuts her eyes. "Okay," she breathes, as if trying to get used to the idea. "Okay." 

"I'm sorry." 

Scully turns her head and looks at him, blue eyes boring right into him. "It hurts, Mulder. I can feel them," she rasps. 

His mouth opens. "Your fingertips?" 

"It's the strangest feeling. They're there, but they're not at the same time." 

He moves the chair closer to the bed and carefully lifts her left arm from the bed. Automatically he lifts her hand to his mouth and presses his lips to her wrist, just below the bandages. He smells Betadine and the iron of blood. 

"They're gone," she says in an unwavering voice. 

He squeezes her wrist gently. "Your hands will still be beautiful to me, Scully." 

Yes, he knows that's cold comfort to her now. 

But they will. 

She shuts her eyes and drifts off again into a drugged doze. Just as he has done so many times in the past, he sits in the uncomfortable chair, his fingers wrapped around her wrist, his thumb touching the heel of her hand. 

Her fingers may have been taken, but he will still hold her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read this story before, this is an edited version. I decided that the first-person POV wasn't really working and converted it to third-person.


End file.
